Definitive Guide to the Customer Centric

Get Mark’s Definitive Guide to the Customer Centric approach to Business

Learn about how customer centric business developed and what the benefits are, along with a description of the Five Tenets, the Nine Imperatives for Leaders and do a self-assessment to work out where to start with your transition..!

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Build A Customer Centric Business

Customer Centric. Business Resilience.

The benefits of customer centricity have been well researched and documented (for example by Harvard Professor Ranjay Gulati and Forrester Research), but you do not become customer centric by bolting it onto your old approach.

To become customer centric and reap the benefits you need to adjust your approach. The benefits are, greater levels of engagement with employees and customers, who both become promoters of what you do; and higher levels of profitability and resilience in tough market conditions.

There are Five Tenets to the Customer Centric approach to Business that then provide us with the Nine Imperatives for Leaders. In many cases this is a relatively straightforward realignment of what you are already doing, but with a huge upside. If you adopt some of these principles, you will realise improvements. If you can apply and adopt all these imperatives your organisation will change and you will realise the full scope of benefits from becoming customer centric.

Customer Centric approach to Business explained

This video provides an explanation of the Customer Centric approach to Business

Most of our business practices we use today were developed through the Industrial Age. Today we are quickly moving into a digital age, and this has triggered a shift towards an experience economy. Customers have changed how they behave, employees have changed how they feel, therefore how we lead and manage has to change. We need to adapt our business and management practice to suit our age.

Leverage from the five tenets of the customer centric approach to business, for improved profitability and engagement.

Apply the Nine Imperatives for Leaders

Today, we all know that being customer-centric delivers business benefits, but most organisations that attempt to realise these benefits fail, or at best struggle to implement. The key insight is to change our approach. Bolting customer-centricity onto organisations designed for the last century does not deliver the goods. Understanding the principles behind customer centricity in the Five Tenets, and then applying the corresponding Nine Imperatives for leaders will align the organisation around being a Customer Centric Business.

Research into customer centric businesses has shown that they are more profitable and resilient to market changes (such as recessions). Additionally, outside-in organisations have employees that are more engaged and more customer that are advocates.

This is a quick customer centric assessment you can do. Based on the Five Tenets of the Customer Centric approach to Business and the corresponding Nine Imperatives for Leaders, this self assessment will give you an overview of how customer centric you really are.

Profit by Design™ can be used as a tactical approach to improving customer centricity, with short term benefits from greater alignment of resources and messaging, resulting in greater levels of engagement. This whitepaper describes the six principles behind Profit by Design™ and then an explanation of the Architecture for Customer Engagement. Includes a template for working on your own Architecture for Customer Engagement.

The Architecture for Customer Engagement is the framework Mark uses to develop the optimal activity that delivers value for customers and for the organisation. This framework starts with identifying your intent with the various customer groups and flows through to the goal of creating a customer portfolio full of profitable promoters. The design brings alignment of resources to maximise the value for the customer portfolio and for the customer groups. Post implementation, an action learning cycle approach is used to ensure a progressive mindset towards improvement.Read more

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The ultimate question for advocacy

Most of us have answered the question "how likely are you to recommend this service to your friends, family and colleagues". We give it a score between zero and ten. When you ask your customers this question, if they score between zero and six, they are detractors and likely to give negative word of mouth about you. Those that score seven or eight are passive. Customers that score you nine or ten are promoters. That is they are likely to give you positive word of mouth, customer advocacy. Your net promoter score is the percentage of promoters you have over detractors.

Satisfaction scores measure a moment in time. NPS is a predictor of future behaviour.

Mark is a Net Promoter Certified Associate, and has implemented NPS into both B2B and B2C contexts.

Hyne engaged Mark Hocknell to help lead the management team take a completely new approach to how Hyne interacted and serviced their customer base. As a traditional manufacturing business, our customers weren’t at the centre of our business. With Mark’s experiences, we worked a program that allowed the team at Hyne to understand our business and customers, developed customer strategies that then underpinned our service delivery, selling and account management approach.
A new customer program called C1 (Customer 1st) was born across the company which set the standard for how all parts of the business was to service our customers. Mark’s experience in this space covered off by a calm and mature approach in team based environments worked in paying dividends with many of the processes and systems developed still in play today. If you want to develop a customer centric business, Mark is your man.